wages. Bound up with direct payment are those indirect elements of
remuneration or deduction from remuneration covered by length of
working-hours and by sanitary conditions, since whatever saps the
girl's energy or undermines her health, whether overwork, foul air,
or unsafe or too heavy or overspeeded machinery, forms an actual
deduction from her true wages, besides being a serious deduction from
the wealth-store, the stock of well-being, of the community.

Up till comparatively recent times the particular difficulties I
have been enumerating did not exist, since, under the system of home
industries universal before the introduction of steam-power, there was
not the same economic competition between men and women, nor was there
this unnatural gap between the occupation of the woman during her
girlhood and afterwards in her married life. In the majority of cases,
indeed, she only continued to carry on under her husband's roof the
very trades which she had learned and practiced in the home of her
parents. And this applied equally to the group of trades which we
still think of as part of the woman's natural home life, baking and
cooking and cleaning and sewing, and to that other group which have
become specialized and therefore are now pursued outside the home,
such as spinning and weaving. It was true also in large part of the
intrinsically out-of-door employments, such as field-work.

In writing about a change while the process is still going on, it is
extremely difficult to write so as not to be misunderstood. For there
are remote corners, even of the United States, where the primitive
conditions still subsist, and where woman still bears her old-time
relation to industry, where the industrial life of the girl flows on
with no gap or wrench into the occupational life of the married woman.
Through wifehood and motherhood she indeed adds to her burdens, and